Forgive my body is, in some way, a work linked to the three previous ones by playwright and director Queralt Riera (Parets dels Vallès, 1978) due to the theme of violence. In Dona she spoke about the violence involved in prostitution, in Pruna about the violence of child sexual abuse, and in I porn, you porno about that which nests on women's bodies. Now, in Forgive my body, she speaks to us of man's violence over the female body and soul, that is to say, of the gender-based violence that has claimed 44 lives to date since the beginning of the year.

With the 1992 Olympic Games, Barcelona gained a worldwide reputation that turned it into a tourist destination celebrated by some and condemned by others. But, in addition, it lost what had been a cultural celebration for four years of the highest international level thanks to the Autumn Festivals directed by Mario Gas and the Olympic Arts Festival. Since then, Barcelona raised the curtain without any special relief beyond the more or less charming proposals of public and private theater.

Arthur Miller (New York, 1915 - Roxbury, Connecticut, 2005) is one of the most poignant playwrights of 20th-century realist theater in the United States. His work A View from the Bridge has not lost its relevance: the issue of irregular immigration is very much alive among us and also in Donald Trump's United States, with an immigration police (ICE) as feared and savage as in the fifties, when Miller sets this story.

After the successes achieved with the two installments of Escape Room and with the scripts written for Joan Pera (El pare de la núvia and Júnior), the playwright Joel Joan ratifies his devotion to entertainment comedy. He does so within the parameters expressed a few days ago by Eugenio Barba at the opening act of the Institut del Teatre's academic year, where he stated that the mission of theater is to entertain (something quite different from what Ingmar Bergman maintained at the beginning of Fanny and Alexander, when, over the face of the child looking at the puppet theater, we read: "Not just to entertain"). Barba, founder and soul of the Odin Teatret, recalled that modern theater is born when a company puts tickets for a show on sale, and said: "First one must live, because otherwise there is no theater or art."

Although the audiovisual imagination moves extensively around traumatic and violent stories, most people have a normal life. And this means a family, work, and romantic life with sweet and bitter moments, with jolts but without other earthquakes than those that may shake one's health. And Charlotte, the protagonist of Morning sun, is part of these normal people. The show takes its title from the Edward Hopper painting of a woman sitting on a bed watching the passage of time.

La Zaranda, Teatro Inestable de Ninguna Parte, celebrates its fortieth anniversary with the annual appointment at the Romea by the will of its until now director Josep Maria Pou and in attention to the group of fans that have followed them for so many years. And the fact is that La Zaranda's theater is so peculiar and different from everything that can be seen on stage... A theater stripped of artifices that makes virtue of simplicity and that draws from the classics without performing them. A theater in which the creation of a singular world prevails, crossed by an almost existentialist poetics and inhabited by losers. Displaced characters like Beckett's clowns who do not know what to do or how to do it but who continue with inherited routines. Characters of great pathos like these angels that Eusebio Calonge has imagined and that could just as well inhabit a corner of the Spanish picaresque of the Golden Age as the London neighborhood of Mackie the Knife, from The Threepenny Opera, or the suburbs of a modern city. Through the black space of All the angels took flight –occupied only by four large old books, which will finally be the martyrs' tombstone, a bed frame, a box of Imperial beers and plenty of blankets– walk a robber and drug dealer named Virgilio (Gaspar Campuzano), the Romanian prostitute Micaela (Ingrid Magrinyà), the also prostitute and junkie Alacrana (Natalia Martínez), the pimp Paco Cadena (Enrique Frutos) and Ramonet (Francisco Sánchez), a poor “fool” who speaks little but quotes Shakespeare and Dostoevsky.

It is logical that a good part of the audience that goes to the theater looks for entertainment with laughter that does not make them think. It is no longer so logical that the billboard is filled with this type of theater, ignoring proposals that invite one to ask questions and talk about what has been seen. As you can imagine with this preamble, A small distortion is a proposal from the latter, like almost all the theater of Enric Nolla. A theatre that avoids conventional logic and approaches the dark corners of the human being, as is evident in his dramaturgical debut, Hurricane (2000), passing through White slave trade (2001) and ending with this A small distortion, in which he reflects on the creation of masculinity in our society, making it very clear with the title that it is the author himself who poses the question. And he does so with the help of a character of those who take the air bridge in first class, who have a closet full of ties. A self-satisfied winner who despises the weak and hates failure in a clear critique of a model with Trump-like airs. And the fact is that Nolla's theater is neither innocuous nor kind; it avoids the obvious and responds to the restlessness of someone who confronts an ungraspable world often prone to destruction. We find the protagonist in a luxurious penthouse with impressive views of the city, while he prepares the speech he is to deliver at the company party that has just awarded him the management of an international delegation.

28 years ago, Pep Tosar began a line of creations revolving around poets with that fantastic La casa en obres in which he approached the life and work of the Majorcan Blai Bonet, and which the Teatre del Raval will precisely revive in December to commemorate the hundred years since his birth. Since then, Tosar has walked his imagination through the biography and work of Damià Huguet (Esquena de gabinet) –to whom he has dedicated the small hall of the theatre–, of Guillem d’Efak (Tots aquests dois), of Fernando Pessoa (El fingidor) and of Federico García Lorca with the show Federico García, premiered in 2015 at the Teatre Romea and revived with the inauguration of the new Teatre del Raval.

Catalan farmhouses and ancestral homes are the memory of a time and a country. They are the memory of a society, a way of living, of loving, of working and, consequently, the memory of those who lived and, all too often, died there. The memory of a peasantry.

Suicides often leave farewell letters that can explain the reasons for such a drastic decision. Writers of the stature of Virginia Woolf, Stefan Zweig, Cesare Pavese, and the much less known Henri Roorda, author of the work that Mario Gas presents at the Sala Beckett, did so.

Theater usually tells stories, but there is theater that also asks questions, that demands the spectator to define themselves in front of what they are seeing or have just seen. This is the case of Don't look, the new production by the performing arts and audiovisual collective Cultura i Conflicte. Once the performance is over, spectators can access a cubicle installed in the lobby of the Gothic hall of the Biblioteca de Catalunya and answer the questions that have emerged throughout the proposal. Would you continue to love your father if you found out he had been a torturer and murderer? Would you tolerate someone's torture to save your child?

The premiere of La belle Hélène at the Teatre Lliure directed by Pere Planella in 1979 constituted the first great popular success for the company that had opened the Gràcia theatre three years earlier with Camí de nit. Miquel Mas Fiol's proposal which commemorates the fifty years of the Lliure moves away from Offenbach's operetta to build a heartfelt and quite entertaining tribute to the founders and their way of working and living theatre.

Tradition says that the essence of theatre lies in a stage with a performer and a chair. Nothing else is needed. An idea that, if there is a Barcelona theatre that explores it, it is Àlex Rigola's Heartbreak Hotel, which makes a virtue of scenic minimalism. It returns now with the magnificent theatrical game that Sergi Belbel wrote some years ago and which won two awards (Ciutat de València 2022 and Critics' Award of Valencian writers) but which had never been premiered: She and Machine. An actress and an actor and a chair embraced by the splendid lighting of Kiko Planas in an empty space.

All Cirque du Soleil shows are similar, but some have something that makes them special. Kurios. Cabinet of Curiosities is one of them. An imaginative show like a story without a plot, populated by very surprising and curious characters, such as the accordion man, the bathyscaphe man, the machine man, the robot insects, and the inventor scientist with airs of the Franz of Copenhagen from TBO. A fantasy with magical touches that invites you to enter this scientist's laboratory and discover that, like E.T., you can fly on a bicycle, even upside down (as the French acrobat Anne Weissbecker does); that you can see an invisible lion, or you can cheer on the non-existent tightrope walker Giuseppe so he jumps from the trapeze into the water basin in the Invisible Circus of the fantastic Argentine clown Facundo Giménez, who in the second act offers a very funny animal mime act.

A good story and a great performer. Nothing else is needed to achieve a great theater performance. In this case, it is the story of the childhood and adolescence of the actor, director, and writer Fernando Fernán Gómez, adapted by the man who was his friend and collaborator for years, José Sacristán. A Sacristán who, it must be said, at 88 years old fills the theater with a clear diction full of nuances that can be heard perfectly until the very last row. It is a sincere and heartfelt tribute to his friend by a Sacristán who, at this stage of the journey that is life, has made the theater a territory of reality and pleasure. A Sacristán who does not need great scenography or theatrical machinery. A chair and a cushion (which he says was his grandmother's), a kind of trunk, a lamp, and the fall of a piece of curtain evoke a space of creation and life.

The classics speak to us of today and of ourselves. They speak to us of human relationships, of politics, of power, of who we are, how we are, and how we relate to each other. An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen and its protagonist, Thomas Stockman, are a clear example. 144 years after its publication, the play maintains a fierce relevance tied, of course, to the political dilemmas it poses. And even more so: it is also tied to Brazil, where director Christiane Jatahy sets the play, and to the fidelity to scientific truth defended by Doctor Thomas Stockman, even if it implies the ruin of the community, or the renunciation to preserve the economic interests of society.

Venezuela is the paradigm of theoretically rich South American states subjected to historical political disjunctions between left-wing spaces, which, wrapped in the flags of revolution, promise and do not deliver, and right-wing spaces abducted by the rules of maximum profit that promise and also do not deliver, between the defense of identity —they call it patriotism— and selling to the highest bidder. Today's Venezuela is Venezuela between, on the one hand, the inoperable and incapable Chavista dictatorship sold to the American mafia by the executors of the utopia and, on the other hand, the siren songs of an opposition led by a candidate who trusted the same gang mafioso that doesn't even let her return to her country.

Roland Schimmelpfennig is one of the most performed German authors in the world, and his work has begun to emerge among us since the premiere of The Arabian Night (2006) at the Sala Beckett under the direction of Toni Casares. His theatre shuns conventional dramatic conventions and, consequently, explores new ways of explaining reality. He does so through a play of social and personal tensions within a hyper-fragmented and repetitive narrative, which illustrates very well the accelerated, nervous, almost convulsive nature of today's society. All of this is seasoned with corrosive humour. They are always demanding works for the performers but also for the spectators, confronted with a stage development where the information, scarce but sufficient, is admirably mixed with an often stark poetic lyricism where the characters elude logic.

The worship of beauty and narcissistic vanity are now very present in society through the world of social networks. You are as you are seen. And you must always be seen well. It's not about making a pact with the devil to preserve youth, but with personal trainers and cosmetic shops to groom yourself.

Tall, agile, well-built, attractive, furious, violent, histrionic, clownish. And without a hump. This is Shakespeare's Richard III as imagined by Calixto Bieito, which has been at the Grec Festival in a 2025 production by Buenos Aires' Teatro San Martín, starring actor Joaquín Furriel, whom Calixto Bieito had already directed in 2010 in a version of "Life is a dream of Calderón de la Barca.